


Bite The Hand

by sqvalors



Series: i'm bleeding i'm not just making conversation [2]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Aftermath of Violence, Angst, Blood and Injury, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, First War with Voldemort, M/M, Making Out, Minor Marlene McKinnon/Dorcas Meadowes, Miscommunication, POV Sirius Black, Post-Hogwarts, Unresolved Emotional Tension, imagine knowing how to use tags couldn't be me, sirius black is a hot mess and can't communicate for shit
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-03
Updated: 2021-01-03
Packaged: 2021-03-13 22:53:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,144
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28536186
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sqvalors/pseuds/sqvalors
Summary: November, 1980: Sirius wants to crack open his own chest and spill everything on the floor between them, guts and all, and hold the good parts up to the light.
Relationships: Sirius Black & Marlene McKinnon, Sirius Black/Remus Lupin
Series: i'm bleeding i'm not just making conversation [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2090451
Comments: 16
Kudos: 62





	Bite The Hand

**Author's Note:**

> this is a companion piece to left and leaving but can be read independently! rated M for off-screen violence, injury description, and also one use of the word cunt (in an argument context, not a sexual context)

Like so many of their arguments these days it begins from the splinter of some earlier fallout, dug in deep under the skin and grown septic. Hurts to press, hurts to ignore.

“Do you think you could try, for once maybe, to tell me the truth,” Remus says that night, washing up the muggle way with his back to Sirius and his shoulders hunched, his whole frame brittle beneath the cable-knit jumper the Potters' got him three Christmases ago. Sirius is leaning against the counter with a mug of lukewarm coffee held tight in his hands. They haven’t been in the flat at the same time for weeks and it’s only by chance that they’ve crossed over this evening. He blinks and frowns, as if Remus can see him – as if it would matter – and draws a deep breath in through his nose.

“About what,” he says, pettily so, because there's only one answer and they both know it.

“You must think I'm so fucking stupid.” Remus jams a plate into the drying rack. Sirius watches the soap suds track down the porcelain and puddle along the aluminium beneath.

“Should I start clocking in and out.”

“Don't _do_ that.”

“Do what.”

“Get all smarmy and self-righteous as if you haven't been avoiding me all month.” Remus is scrubbing at a pasta pot a little more viciously than necessary. “Where have you been?”

Sirius takes a mouthful of coffee to drag out his answer. Nothing he says will suffice, even if he decides to tell the truth, all the ugly parts, because Remus has clearly already made up his mind in that regard. Something in his chest clenches tight.

“It hardly matters, does it,” he says.

“Christ, Sirius.” Remus slams his palms on the edge of the sink, leaving soapy handprints, and then he breathes hard through his nose before turning to face him at last. “Can you stop being a cryptic bastard and just talk to me like a person?”

Sirius meets his gaze and it cleaves straight to the bone. He puts his mug down on the worktop behind his hip and considers for a moment.

“Do you really think I could come home from doing god knows what and stand here with you like everything was fine?” Sirius hates the taste in his mouth, the bitter edge of desperation. “What do you think I am, Remus?”

He hardly ever calls him by his name these days. He calls him Moony, he calls him love, he calls him Lupin when he’s feeling particularly annoying, which is often. He’s called him all manner of things when they’re alone in the dark, open mouth pressed to the hollow of his throat. Sirius sets his jaw in a stubborn tilt and stares him down, a pounding in his ears like a distant bassline.

“I think you’re a liar.” Remus says it plainly, quietly. His fingertips drip water onto the lino. “I think you think you’re good at it.”

Sirius _knows_ he’s good at it, is the thing. The sting of it comes in the naming, the simple way Remus says as if of course he’s a liar, it’s in his blood and his bones and what else could he ever be with a history like his? Sirius swallows the retort building in his throat. He steps forward as if to leave the kitchen, his head buzzing loud and cold, but Remus stands in his way. 

“Don’t walk away from me.”

“Jesus, do we have to do this now?” He’s tired in a way that makes him feel like unravelling. The push and pull of their conversations tread the line between petty argument and real fight all too often, and this one is already plummeting over the precipice. “You don’t get to act all high and mighty with me as if you aren’t the patron saint of lying through your fucking teeth.”

“I’ve never lied to you.”

“Lying by omission counts, by the way.”

“Oh please,” Remus snaps. “Will you get over yourself?”

“That’s really fucking rich.”

“Where have you been, Sirius?” Remus inhales deep, a last-ditch attempt to ease the tremor in his voice. “That’s all I asked.”

Sirius wants to crack open his own chest and spill everything on the floor between them, guts and all, sift through the viscera with bloody hands and hold the good parts up to the light. He wishes explaining himself didn’t felt like an admission of guilt. He wants Remus to trust him like James does, implicitly, where suspicion wouldn’t even enter the picture because they’re made of the same circuitry and always have been. He could never make Remus have that much faith in him and that’s his own fault, but it doesn’t make it any easier to stomach.

“What do I have to do? You want me to explain myself, but you can disappear for weeks and it’s fine, is it.” Sirius shrugs, agitated. Remus’ eyes are dark and searching, arms hanging loose at his side like he’s forgotten they’re there.

“It’s different.”

“Why? Because of my family? Regulus? Because there must be something in me that can be twisted by Riddle, right, if he’s got all of them and not me? Do you really think–”

“Don’t make me out to be paranoid,” Remus says. There’s an old hurt in his eyes, the crease between his brows. He doesn’t have to say _you know why_ for Sirius to hear it hanging in the silence strung out between them. “It’s nothing to do with your family. Not everything is about your fucking family.”

Sirius can go weeks not thinking about the myriad ways he’s fucked things up and then suddenly the world kaleidoscopes around him until he sees them all at once, repeated and garish. It shouldn’t sting as much as it does that Remus is looking at him now and finding him wanting. His flaws are his family’s flaws in different shades: he has his father’s eyes and his mother’s temper and the seemingly inbuilt superiority complex that runs through his family like a coal seam. He knows well enough that he’s too steeped in Grimmauld to ever really escape it. Sometimes he thinks that even if he were to wake up completely obliviated there would still be something inside him that was a little rotten.

“It gets old, you know,” Remus is saying. “Sometimes I think you like pretending there’s someone to blame other than yourself.”

“Don’t be a cunt, it doesn’t suit you,” Sirius says, instead of _that’s not fair,_ because Remus always does this and he always feels two paces behind the argument _._ “Are you going to stand there all night or are you going to let me get past? I have somewhere to be.”

“I’m surprised you can even tell me you’re leaving, careful you don’t breach any rules.”

“I’m running a job with Marlene,” says Sirius, palms spread wide. “Is that fucking good enough for you? I’m on a job with Marlene and I have to meet her at Victoria in about fifteen minutes, so if you don’t mind.”

Remus weighs him up and Sirius has never felt smaller. When he says nothing and simply steps around him to continue the washing up Sirius wants nothing more than to break every single plate on the draining rack into shards small enough to be painless.

-

“Do you have the flasks?” Marlene asks.

“Yeah.” Sirius reaches into the inside pocket of his leather jacket – roomier than it usually is – and pulls out two silver hip flasks of Polyjuice, handing one over. “Should fit neatly in whatever decorative bag you’ve got for this evening.”

They’re standing in the ladies’ toilets at Victoria Station, the door temporarily warded to divert anyone else trying to get in. Sirius is leaning back against the edge of the end cubicle and trying not to check his watch. He’d arrived late, the row with Remus weighing him down so heavy he’d chosen to walk most of the way instead of apparating in the hopes of ridding himself of it. Marlene digs around in the charmed backpack she’s dumped on the bank of sinks until she drags out a dress-bag and bundles it into his hands.

“That’s yours, and I’ve got some bits and pieces in here.” She’s fiddling with the chain of her necklace, twisting it round until she can undo the clasp and slip it into the side-pocket of the bag where the rest of their personal effects will go. “Had to scour a handful of charity shops around Hogsmeade for the rings. Dor tinkered a bit to put the family crest on them, since they all seem to go in for that sort of thing.”

Sirius holds the dress-bag up and lets it unfold to its full length so he can squint through the blurry plastic; a plain white shirt half hidden by dark black formal robes, a silver shine to the material when it hits the light, the hint of a dark blue lining that looks velvet. The sort of austere cut he hasn’t had to touch since he was fifteen and forced to attend family events, which makes them the perfect outfit for a pureblood function at the Grosvenor House Hotel.

“Why they all have to dress like pricks I’ll never know,” he mutters.

“It’s in their handbook, right under _become a fash bastard_.”

“I bet they do have a sodding handbook, Riddle seems the type.” Sirius folds the dress-bag over his arm. “How ugly’s your outfit then?”

“Ianthe Greengrass is wearing a delightful set of winter dressrobes in Prussian blue, to match the lining of yours, and she’s wearing her best jewels because this is one of the first parties she’s attended since popping out an heir.” Marlene checks her hair in the mirror, which Sirius thinks is largely pointless given nobody will be seeing it. “Curtains up at eight, so we’ve got about half an hour before we arrive fashionably late. That gives us a solid window to mingle and see what the fuss is about.”

“Got time for a smoke as well.”

“If you’re quick.” Marlene turns round and hoists herself up onto the counter, careful to avoid the dampest spots around the sinks. She dips into the bag again, her arm disappearing up to the shoulder, and pulls out a squashed pack of Newports. She rolls her eyes at the face Sirius is pulling. “I wasn’t offering you one anyway, Black. Get your own fags.”

“Appalling manners, anyone would think you were a halfblood,” Sirius says, flashing her a smile and dodging when she swipes at his hip with one boot. He rummages in his pocket for his cigarettes. “Really going method on this ‘old married couple’ stuff I see.”

“I hope darling Daphne hasn’t inherited your impertinence.” Marlene drops her head back against the mirror, a cigarette held between her teeth, and cups a hand to light it with magic. She bumps her heels off the counter side. “Maybe the nanny can iron it out of her.”

“We’ll find out when she hits five and we meet her properly.”

Sirius thinks he should probably start getting dressed but the thought of having to put on someone else’s face for the evening makes him tired. The real Greengrasses had been in receipt of the invitation to tonight’s event long enough to RSVP, and then been obliviated and left to get on with their week; no doubt that had been Moody or perhaps one of the Prewetts, particularly adept at that line of work. Sirius hasn’t asked how the required Polyjuice ingredients had been acquired, he just knew that he’d been presented with them three months ago and told to make a batch meant to last. The Greengrasses were a useful tool to have – pureblood to the bone, prominent but not too much so, and certainly not yet in the inner circle if they were even aiming for it. Sirius lights up his own cigarette.

“What did you tell Lupin you were up to tonight?” Marlene asks.

“I didn’t.”

“How’s that going for you.”

“He didn’t ask.” Sirius starts undoing the laces of his boots onehanded, holding the cigarette clamped in his mouth. He thinks of the vitriol in Remus’ eyes, the soap suds slipping from his hands. “Knows not to.”

Marlene pulls a face that Sirius pretends not to see, all raised eyebrows and that thing she does with the corner of her mouth. Sirius finishes with one boot and moves onto the next. He doesn’t want to get into this.

“I suppose you tell Dorcas everything then.”

“Only the bits that make me sound particularly daring.” Marlene winks at him and exhales a stream of smoke at the ceiling.

“I’m sure fracturing your ankles jumping from that fire escape went down a treat.”

“She loves a woman who does her own stunts.” She swings the Polyjuice flask between her thumb and forefinger, as precarious as the night ahead. “Have you gone over the Greengrass file?”

“Yes.” Sirius doubts anyone will ask him about Augustine Greengrass’ grandfather over canapes, but it doesn’t hurt. Old Grandpa Acastus and his proficiency for architectural wards might be the topic of many a conversation for all he knew. They might only be at risk of minor humiliation if it were to come up anyway – they have a suggestion of Death Eater involvement at tonight’s event, enough to warrant their presence, but it’s by no means guaranteed. As far as Sirius is concerned they may as well be using Order time to drink expensive wine and tolerate a lot of Ministry debate over prawn cocktail.

“Worst case scenario I feel like we’ll be able to coast on hearsay.”

“Oh yes Lucius, I do remember you copping off with Araminta Lovejoy behind the greenhouses back in fourth year, old boy,” Sirius says, in his best imitation of his father. He hates that he doesn’t have to try very hard. “The trick is to nod along and laugh like you’ve a silver spoon stuck up your arse, McKinnon.”

“I knew you were good at this for a reason,” Marlene says airily. She picks at a run in her tights. “Chop chop then, I still need to put my face on after I’ve put Ianthe’s on. Hope she suits dark lipstick.”

Sirius nods absently. He bundles the dress-bag under one arm and steps out of his boots, grimacing a little at his socked feet touching the tiles – Marlene rolls her eyes, and throws a small bag of jewellery in his direction.

“The signet ring in there is the most important, take your pick of the rest.”

“Fair enough,” Sirius says. He reaches across to stub out his cigarette in the sink, vanishes the remains when he sees the look Marlene gives him, and then pushes open the nearest cubicle with his foot. He raises his flask in salute. “See you on the other side, Mrs. Greengrass. Next we meet I’ll be a new man.”

“I hope he has better music taste,” Marlene says, through the door. Sirius hears her drop down from the counter and then the rustle and zip sounds of her swapping out her clothes.

“He certainly doesn’t have better dress sense.” Sirius holds the robes up to the light with vague distaste. Through the door he hears Marlene undo the flask. “I don’t think this style of collar has been in since the 1800s.”

“Fuck that’s vile,” Marlene coughs. “I always forget.”

By the time Sirius has swigged down the right dose of Polyjuice and gone through the unnerving feeling of his skin rippling into new proportions, which makes him think unbidden of Remus in a way that aches, Marlene is leaning across the sink and deftly applying a second coat of lipstick to Ianthe Greengrass’ cupid’s bow. She catches his eye in the mirror as he leaves the cubicle and raises a newly auburn eyebrow.

“Five foot eight suits you.”

“Fuck off.” He shoves his pile of clothes into the backpack and then stows it in the end cubicle, locking the door with a tap of his wand. “I’m sure he makes up for it.”

“I hope Daphne takes after her mother. That nose is truly something to behold.”

“It’s classically Roman, it’s very stately.” Sirius slicks his hair back, a blonde pale enough to look silver in the anaemic bathroom lights, and grimaces at himself in the mirror. The collar is starched stiff enough to be uncomfortable. “Anyway I’d be surprised if she didn’t, what with the inbreeding.”

“It’s truly a wonder more of them don’t have a Habsburg jaw thing going on.”

“You’d be surprised.” Sirius busies himself with arranging the faux antique jewellery on unfamiliar hands. “There are some real shockers in the Black family back catalogue.”

“You shouldn’t be so hard on yourself baby.” Marlene checks her watch once more before slipping it inside a small evening bag and turning to face him. She smiles a smile that isn’t hers but is, somehow, and offers her arm. “Time to go.”

“If we must,” Sirius says, and hooks his elbow through hers.

-

It’s past four in the morning when he apparates into the living room. He lands hard and stumbles, his right arm going out to catch himself before his body remembers and he grits his teeth around a stream of curses, the pain shocking up through his fingertips into the core of the hex burn in his shoulder. The healers had done their best, wrapped it tight and sent him home with a salve and instructions, but he hadn’t wanted to stay. Hospitals make him feel claustrophobic in his own body and the healers tend to step around lingering Order members like they’re unexploded bombs, with their bloodied clothes and too-neat stories that don’t quite align with the damage they’re brought in with. He’d sent a patronus to Moody and gone to fetch their things from Victoria as soon as he’d been cleared to leave – he’d kept the starched shirt on for the sake of not yanking anything over his head with his fucked-up shoulder but setting the ruined dressrobes on fire in the sinks had been a highlight of one of the shittiest nights he’s had for a while. Seeing Marlene laid out, her face bloodless and half obscured by the quick hands of a team of emergency medics had grabbed at something in his gut and twisted horribly.

The Polyjuice wore off way back but Remus still regards him with an edge of suspicion when he lurches half asleep from the bedroom, wand already aimed at Sirius’ chest. In the grey light of the dawn he looks like a scared child.

“Pads?” Remus’ gaze flits between his face and the bandage around his shoulder where it’s visible at the neck of his half-open dress shirt. “What happened?”

Sirius knows from the nickname he hasn’t heard in weeks and the fact that Remus hasn’t even asked the usual safeguarding questions that he must look like shit. Sirius knows he also looks deranged – wearing his old jeans with a wrecked formal shirt, blood on the cuffs and collar that probably isn’t all his, his eyes blown from the adrenaline and whatever pain meds the healers insisted on giving him before agreeing to let him go. Remus is staring at him as if he’s on fire and in a way he supposes he is.

“What are you–” Remus starts, but Sirius is in front of him, almost nose to nose.

“I’m not a liar,” he says. “I’m not.” If he says it here in the same shared exhaled breath it’s almost as if it’s a vow that could have come from either of them; if he says it here maybe it’ll be true. He wants to paint the words on the walls of their bedroom so Remus has no choice but to read them, _I’m not a liar I’m not I’m not I’m not_. He walks Remus back until he’s pressed against the wall, one hand at his waist and the other at the juncture where shoulder meets throat as if Remus is the first solid thing Sirius has held in weeks and he doesn’t quite know what to do about it. He moves his palm to the hinge of Remus’ jaw, the pad of his thumb dragging across his cheekbone.

“Okay,” Remus says, hot against Sirius’ mouth. His hands are curled into the front of Sirius’ jacket, caught between pulling him in or holding him at bay. Remus keeps staring at the spread of the hex burn spidering out beneath the skin like black ink. “Sirius, the blood.”

“Not all mine.”

“But _some of it_ –”

“Please.” He doesn’t know what he’s asking for. There’s a hum of dread at the back of his head that’s been getting incrementally louder for months now in the way only dread can, bleeding out into everything. It’s been screaming since Sirius told Remus where he was going tonight and he doesn’t know how to quieten it. He’d hardly heard anything over the sound of it in the split second he knew they’d been made, him and Marlene, too comfortable in the night being mostly for show to notice when the air shifted. The way the room had seemed to shrink around them, containing nothing except his own caged fear and the first flash of magic that had sent Marlene slamming into the wall with a crunch Sirius will hear when he closes his eyes for the next six months.

Remus kisses him then, yanking him in by the edges of his jacket, like an answer to a question Sirius hasn’t asked. He thinks he could live in that first too-hard press of Remus’ mouth, the way he works his hands inside Sirius’ jacket like they’ve never been anywhere else, like he’d get them inside his skin if he could. This could be a freezeframe from any of the last five years if it weren’t so painfully obvious that they were running on near death experiences and the last clinging hopes of something stable. Sirius slips his hand up under Remus’ pyjama top, an old Ramones shirt he knows is his, licks into his mouth as if the answers to everything are there if he can just get at them. He wants this to prove something, to quieten the heart slamming in his throat. _Please._

“What happened?” Remus asks, forehead to forehead, his voice still rough with sleep. He pushes Sirius’ jacket down from his bad shoulder, touching his fingertips to the edge of the bandaging so lightly Sirius hardly notices. He shrugs the jacket the rest of the way off and hears it hit the carpet.

“Attacked at the Grosvenor,” he says, because it doesn’t matter if Remus knows where he was anymore. He isn’t entirely sure Remus hasn’t known all along. What alibi does he have, being here alone all night, Sirius thinks, if he was even here alone at all. He turns blind from that thought the moment it settles.

“Marlene?”

“St. Mungo’s. It was.” Sirius runs his fingers absently through the hair at Remus’ temple, notes the blood in his cuticles. He doesn’t look him in the eye. “It was bad, Moony.”

Remus doesn’t say anything to that and Sirius is glad – he doesn’t want to talk about things that might break the illusion of normalcy, of Remus touching him with intention rather than obligation. It feels near irreverent in the wake of everything, with Marlene lying prone and damaged in St. Mungo’s, but the dull ache in his shoulder and the blood on his shirt from wounds already closed make him want to dive headfirst into any other feeling. Sirius kisses him again, tongue slick and insistent, his hand back beneath Remus’ top to slide along the grooves of his ribs. He feels Remus’ heartbeat hard against his own, blurred at the edges. It’s been weeks since they did this – back before James and Lily went into hiding, when Remus hadn’t snapped at him every other sentence or looked at him like he was trying to pick him apart.

He’s already surprised Remus has let him this close, that Remus had kissed him first, and even now that little pearl of doubt is pointing out every part of this scene that means Remus is the reason for what happened at the Grosvenor. Of course he’s holding Sirius close, of course he’s got his hands on him and his tongue in his mouth; all the better to put the proverbial knife to his throat and slice clean through. Sirius can’t find it in himself to care.

Remus pulls him back in, fingers splayed at the back of his neck, and he doesn’t care what the motive might be. When Remus’ teeth find the edge of his jaw Sirius hopes he leaves a mark.

**Author's Note:**

> this started as a small gapfill for left and leaving mostly for my own benefit (marge simpson voice/ i just think marlene is neat) but i'm pretty pleased with how it ended up! i have only a vague knowledge of how polyjuice works because i haven't read the books for years so if that's flawed it's on me. i just think a hint of subterfuge is cool and sexy.  
> the title is taken from the [boygenius song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZlR6DjehDc), and the names I subbed in for the greengrasses come from a continuation of the greek mythology theme we get given with daphne greengrass and also because I was reading harrow the ninth at the time lol  
> thanks for readin!


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